One of the central pillars of the free market is that fraud is not payable.

Fraud is a free market activity. Survival of the fittest. Define fraud? Successful societies require property rights and cooperation. To the extent that fraud destroys those facets, it may be deleterious, yet it could also be beneficial by destroying a society which is itself a fraud— which is how I would described Western civilization today. The coming fraud free-for-all is a free market creative destruction phenomenon.

A significant actor may well presently be herding sheep in Kazakhstan.

Or writing this message from a $300/mo rental house in Mindanao. Who formerly wrote million user adopted software from a Nipa Hut in the 1990s. Which prompted the Jews to come around offering to buy the venture in exchange for soon-to-be worth-less stock options.

What data is consequential is yet ineffable, as is the identity of the individual butterfly that flapped up Katrina.

But I already explained I do not think there is enough time for any butterfly effect to overcome the juggernaut inertia for what is coming on May 14, 2020. Of the ~10 million Bitcoins whose private keys are not lost, ~7 million are stored in “anyone can spend” SegWit addresses. If you don’t understand the myriad of details I have written in my (some now deleted) archives, then you would not share my holistic perspective.

"Proof-of-work is decentralized and thus very difficult to disrupt."

I refer you to USG warnings that the national electrical grid is susceptible to utter destruction by ~a dozen dedicated insurgents, which would effectively eliminate that PoW.

PoW difficulty scales to any level of systemic hashrate. Even one remaining miner running off of micro hydropower in some remote place in a rural area can sustain PoW.

The likelihood of knocking out all electrical power for the entire world (or even for the entire USA) is absolutely zero. Even an asteroid impact could not do that. Humans are ingenuous. There are so many ways to generate electricity. And with Bitcoin’s 10 minute block period, even shortwave radio can be employed for communication between mining nodes.